One approach to search engines, taken by Google, is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Another approach, once taken by Dogpile, is to have a meta-search engine aggregate the results of other search engines. These approaches create a great haystack of results. For instance, the keyword “cheap travel” returns about 18,000,000 results from Google, about 85,800,000 from Yahoo and 68,377,619 from MSN, as of summer 2005!
Much work has been done to float the “needles” to the top of the results haystack, to devise methods of ranking links returned in response to a query. Google's published patent applications propose, in their titles, to use local inter-connectivity, article information, location awareness and other factors to decide on the position of results. Yahoo, Overture and Microsoft also have worked to refine their presentation of results.
In any set of information, a search term is sometimes not enough to determine what results are sought. In one sense, the search term may be ambiguous, as extensively discussed in Bharat et al., “Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising”, US 205/0131762 A1 published Jun. 16, 2005 and in Carrasco et al., “Disambiguation of Search Phrases Using Interpreation Clusters”, US 2005/0015366 A1 published Jan. 20, 2005. The term “jaguar” might refer to cars, animals, a football team, or an operating system. Even if a term were unambiguous, different users might prefer to access different information. For instance, teenage travelers, business travelers and luxury travelers look for different travel arrangements and accommodations, potentially using similar search terms.
It is desirable to return the most relevant results, whether in response to a search or, more generally, on an information feed. The growing number of documents published on web sites (and of documents accessible on private servers) invites development of alternative or improved technology to quickly return relevant results responsive to users' queries. In effect, to find the 50 or 100 most relevant web sites for a particular user whose keyword is “cheap travel” and effectively summarize them for the user. This further invites development of technologies that personalize the information returned, whether content, sponsored content or advertising, based on the interests of the user.